Redemption's Shadow

by Rick Partlow

  Theoretically, a mech could have been able to fly indefinitely on the fusion-powered jets, but in practice, trying to fit turbines large enough to handle that sort of stress would have turned the mech into a slow, lightly-armed dual-environment fighter. Mecha were all about compromise, which was why they were still the dominant battlefield weapon four hundred years after the fall of the Empire. In this case, the compromise meant Kurtz’s Golem was only able to reach an altitude of just under a hundred meters and couldn’t stay in the air for more than a few seconds before the heat gauges began to spike.

  It was enough. He launched a flight of short-range missiles from his shoulder pod in mid-air, guiding them into the path of the lead Jeuta mecha with a targeting system hooked into the ocular of his helmet. The mech was a Lycos, sleek and deadly and painted dull green and slate grey and it moved with a dancer’s grace as the Jeuta pilot maneuvered desperately, spotting the missiles at the last moment and trying to twist away from their point of aim.

  To the Jeuta’s credit as a pilot, he was nearly successful. Of the four missiles, two missed entirely, passing by less than a meter in front of the Lycos before they struck sandstone and converted hundreds of kilograms of rock and dirt into a billowing monolith of insubstantial haze. But the other two struck the stolen Spartan mech high in the left shoulder and smashed it to the ground like the boot of some ill-tempered god. The Lycos tumbled head over heels, carried by the momentum of its run, shedding burning bits of itself as it went, coming to a halt in a mass of melted, charred metal and smoking ruin.

  Kurtz’s Golem touched down hard, absorbing the impact on bent knees and straining hip joints, throwing the man forward against his restraints. He fought to keep the machine’s balance, running forward several steps, almost into the center of the remaining four Jeuta machines. They’d arrested their breakneck race for the canyon mouth, skidding to a halt in a haze of sand and rock dust scraped off the ground as their massive footpads dug into the surface, and were turning to face him. The closest was fifty meters away, the farthest twice that, and they all had nice, clear fields of fire at his one, solitary mech.

  I should really have thought this through.

  He fired on instinct, “hip-shooting” his Academy instructors had called it, and the Electro-Thermal Chemical cannon round from the weapon mounted along the right arm of his Golem speared through the nearest of the Jeuta, an ancient Reaper patched together and re-armed by the Confederation centuries after its obsolescence in the Dominions. The tungsten slug cored the old mech like an apple and besides being a satisfying indication of success, the plasma plumes erupting from its ruptured core served as temporary concealment.

  Kurtz took immediate advantage of it, breaking into a long-striding run, curving around to the right of the cluster of enemy mecha, keeping the sunfire halo of the exploding Reaper between him and the Jeuta. They’d be turning, trying to track him, pivoting in place, but he was circling them faster than they could track their weapons.

  This was tricky, something practiced a lot in simulators though almost never actually pulled off in combat, but Valentine Kurtz had spent an awful lot of time in simulators in the last couple years. He swiveled the Golem’s upper body to the left while maintaining the curve of his course around the perimeter of the Jeuta formation, sweat beading on his forehead at the concentration it took to pull off the maneuver.

  Targeting on the run was even more difficult, but there was a reason he was a colonel at twenty-nine and it wasn’t just being a friend of the Guardian. It was surviving so many battles where so many other officers had died. He had one flight of missiles left in his launch pod and he spent it on a broad-shouldered Agamemnon, nearly stumbling at the slight sideways push of the fiery expulsion. The flight slammed into the Jeuta mech as one and more fire and smoke and debris clouded the enemy sights, and Kurtz kept running, only steps ahead of the lightning discharge of a high-powered laser.

  The ETC cannon was recharged and reloaded, but he cut loose with the 30mm Vulcan instead, focusing the hail of tungsten bullets on the Valiant whose laser had nearly killed him. Hundreds of rounds ate away at the armor of the mech’s cockpit and punched through the transparent aluminum canopy, transforming the Jeuta pilot into a red mist staining the interior.

  Two left.

  “Colonel, we can’t get a shot with you running around like an idiot.”

  Kurtz snorted amusement at Figueroa’s attempt to sound respectful despite the junior officer’s obvious irritation.

  “Didn’t ask for any help, Figueroa,” he bit off, irritated at the distraction of replying to the man.

  A flash teased at the edge of his vision and tactical systems warned him that a cannon round had come within meters of his cockpit, and his ears burned with embarrassment at nearly dying while doing something this stupid. He fired the ETC cannon and paid the Jeuta Agamemnon back for the slight with a decapitation shot through the cockpit, the round catching the enemy machine at an angle, ripping through the canopy and out the side of the mech’s torso with a spray of sparks.

  Last one.

  This one was smarter than the others. He didn’t try to stand and fight, didn’t try to run. His Valiant had jump-jets and he used them, launching up and out of the killing ground to escape Kurtz’s encirclement. It was a desperate move, but the only one the pilot could make, the only hope for escape, even if it was a scant one. Kurtz dug in his mech’s footpads and skidded in the loose dirt and sand, trying to arrest his momentum and pursue the last enemy machine, but he needn’t have worried.

  A laser ripped apart the sky and lashed into the flying Valiant, slicing through the jump-jet apparatus in the armored bulge over its reactor core, the portion of a mech that was reminiscent of a rucksack on a heavy-laden foot soldier. The turbines blew in a flare of burning metal and the Valiant began its slow but inevitable descent, tumbling in a whirlwind of dark smoke. The crash of thirty-five tons of metal onto the hard sandstone was an almost indescribable cacophony, audible even through the armor of Kurtz’s cockpit. The roar rolled across the plains and left utter silence in its wake.

  That smartass Figueroa stole my kill.

  Kurtz straightened his machine, taking a moment to check his sensors and make sure none of the Jeuta machines were moving.

  “I think that’s it, Armor One,” Figueroa told him. “And, if I might say, sir, that kind of shit is our job.”

  “You may not, Alpha One,” he said, feeling a bit grumpy. He switched frequencies, trying to contact Haskell again. “Assault One, this is Armor One. Enemy mecha are taken care of. You got anything for us?”

  “Ah, roger that, Armor One,” Haskell replied. “I’m going to transmit our coordinates to you. I think we’ve found your survivors. But we can’t get to them without landing a good five kilometers away, and the Jeuta infantry is going to reach them before we do.”

  Kurtz blew out a breath, suddenly tired as adrenalin seeped away.

  “Roger that, Assault One. We’re on our way.” Another adjustment of the communications frequency. “Alpha One, Bravo One, form up on me. One more job to do.”

  No rest for the wicked.

  14

  Contact left!”

  Sergeant Watts, the Second squad leader, had a high-pitched, nasal voice at the best of times, and adrenalin sent it arching upwards to a break at the end of the last word. Not that Colonel John Lee could blame her, under the circumstances.

  The central access hub of the Jeuta cruiser was a broad, cylindrical thoroughfare through the core of the starship, running parallel to the lift tubes. Each deck was built around the hub, one donut-shaped section after another stacked from engineering up through to the bridge, and the hollow cylinder was the quickest way to get around in free-fall. They’d expected opposition traversing it, but they hadn’t seen a living thing since they’d dropped First Sergeant Tremonti and First squad off at the ship’s data core, four decks down.

  Lee didn’t know how big of a crew a Jeuta ship normally ran with, a
nd he was aware all their mech pilots, shuttle crews and infantry were down on Revelation, but he’d expected there to be some sort of damage control activity, expected someone to be going somewhere. The silence had begun to wear at them all and Lee had to restrain himself from urging the squad to move faster. It would have been easy to build up a head of steam in the featureless tunnel in microgravity, but it wouldn’t have been tactically sound to bypass the entrances to the intervening levels without checking them for enemy personnel.

  They’d reached the deck just below the bridge, what the intelligence reports said was likely officers’ quarters and galleys, and Lee had almost convinced himself they wouldn’t encounter any opposition at all until Watts yelled a warning from just five meters ahead of him and all hell broke loose.

  John Lee was the overall commander of the Ranger Brigade for Wholesale Slaughter, but they were a brigade in name only. They’d never had more than a company of actual Rangers the whole time he’d been with Logan Brannigan and there was no room in so small a unit for desk officers sitting back and watching the action on a tactical display. Lyta Randell had left a legacy of field commanders in the thick of combat, and she’d died completing a mission.

  Which meant Lee was, like all Rangers, a gunfighter. They’d been moving in a Ranger file, their weapons pointed in alternate directions, and Lee’s had been aimed to the left. Watts was closer to the hatch than he was, but her carbine was aimed to the right. Lee pressed the trigger on instinct, the recoil of the 6mm carbine countered by an automated blast of maneuvering jets from his backpack.

  The three Jeuta crew clomping along the deckplates with oversized magnetic boots weren’t actual infantry, but they were armed, fat-barreled handguns with magazines behind the pistol grip carried at the ready. They were walking in a tactical formation, one of them on point with the other two trailing by three meters on either side of the passageway. Together with the weapons, that told him they hadn’t been just returning from lunch, they’d been sent out to find him and his Rangers.

  The lead Jeuta male died immediately, and Lee felt the usual surprise at the report and recoil from his rifle, as if someone else had pulled the trigger. The three-round burst slammed into the thing’s center of mass, punching right through the light, shipboard armor it wore. The stuff might have stopped a pistol bullet or flechettes, but it barely slowed down armor-piercing 6mm tungsten slugs travelling at 1,500 meters per second. The Jeuta trooper went slack, fingers slipping off the grip of his weapon, but he remained anchored to the deck through his magnetic boots, swaying silently in the air currents as blood began to orbit his body.

  Lee was shifting targets, but the process was a good deal more complicated in microgravity, not nearly as instinctive nor practiced as much, particularly since the Shakak had acquired artificial gravity. He clutched the maneuvering thruster control tightly in his left hand, twisting it to the right to line up a shot on the one of the remaining Jeuta troops who seemed to be reacting the fastest, but the big, fat-barreled handgun the thing was carrying was already aimed straight at Lee and he knew he wasn’t going to be able to fire in time.

  He didn’t need to. The seconds he’d bought by taking out the lead Jeuta had allowed the rest of the squad time to maneuver and at least four separate bursts of rifle fire converged on the Jeuta who’d been about to shoot. He did squeeze off a single shot as a dozen bullets ripped through his chest, and the report of huge handgun was an explosion thumping chest-deep even through Lee’s armor. The concussion of the sound was so loud, Lee thought he’d been hit, but there was no pain, no tell-tale inertia imparted to him from a projectile impact, so he went on with the assumption he was still alive. For the moment.

  One Jeuta was left and he wasn’t sticking around to find out how the fight turned out. He’d disengaged his magnetic boots and pushed away from the bulkhead, soaring back the way he’d come toward the T-junction. Once he hit it, he could hold up in any compartment on this level and they’d have a hell of a time prying him out. Lee toyed for just a half a second with the idea of letting him go and proceeding up to the bridge, but he was loath to leave armed enemy forces behind him.

  A flick of his right thumb switched the trigger of his weapon from the rifle to the under-barrel grenade launcher and he fired through the hatchway less than a second after the Jeuta passed through it. If the handgun had been loud in the confines of the short passageway, the grenade blast was the final trumpet call of the Frashokereti, the end of the universe when Mithra would make all things new.

  For the Jeuta security trooper attempting to get away, the end of the universe came a bit sooner. His body drifted back through the hatch along with a roiling cloud of smoke-stained crimson from the microglobules of blood slowly mixing with it.

  John Lee bobbed in mid-air, the maneuvering jets in his backpack correcting his position automatically to compensate for the launch of the rocket grenade. Somewhere beyond the passageway, tinny ricochets still pinged off bulkheads, metal fragments from the warhead making their way from one hard surface to another until they found something soft.

  “If they didn’t already know we were coming,” Lee murmured, “they certainly do now.”

  “What do we do, sir?” Watts asked him. Her eyes were wide through the visor of her helmet, and he could see sweat beading on her forehead.

  “Push on, sergeant,” he told her, keeping his voice calm and steady despite the pounding of his heart in his chest. Adrenalin hit senior officers the same as junior NCOs, even if they weren’t supposed to show it. “The bridge is still our objective. Let’s go take it.”

  Magazines down six or eight or ten rounds were swapped out for full ones in rote movements instinctive now after thousands upon thousands of repetitions. Lee loaded a fresh grenade in his launcher and waited for Watts to take point. She was a bit highly strung, but she didn’t panic for all that. She just needed more experience.

  Experience is a wonderful teacher, as long as it doesn’t kill you.

  What was that old saying Colonel Randell had told him once? Oh, yes.

  Experience is a comb nature gives us when we are bald.

  A bit cynical, but Lyta Randell had not been known for her sunny disposition and positive outlook.

  “Follow me, First squad,” Watts said, a puff of compressed gas hissing from the rear of her maneuvering pack propelling her toward the end of the hub.

  This was where things could get tricky. If they expected the Rangers to hit the bridge, they might have sealed the radiation shield tight. They might have hit the escape pods to take their chances in open space, or they might have even rigged the compartment with explosives. He was betting against the latter simply because all the ship’s real soldiers would be planetside, and it wasn’t as if any average ship’s crewmember would know a damned thing about setting up booby traps. Likewise, he doubted they’d chance ejecting in the pods. They had to know the Shakak would simply chase them down.

  But if the whole compartment was sealed off…

  We’ll just have to turn around and leave. Which wouldn’t be the end of the world.

  Watts slowed her ascent, coming to a halt just before the hatchway from the hub into the bridge level. Lee remembered from the schematics they’d reviewed that the passageway from the hub didn’t open directly into the control room itself. Instead, the passage led to a bank of escape pods and a row of emergency vacuum suit storage lockers on the opposite side of the donut-shaped deck from the bridge and the lift banks.

  This would be a damned good place to set up an ambush.

  “Prep it, sir?” Watts asked him.

  Lee moved up just behind her, close enough to see just a small slice of the hatchway, a glimpse of the dull white bulkhead on the other side. She had her rifle aimed into the gap, thumb hovering on the switch for her grenade launcher, waiting for the order to use it.

  “Three of you,” he decided. “Chain fire, high to low. Then the rest push in and set the entry.”

  “Goulden,” she
snapped on the squad net, “Whiting, get up here and stack on me.”

  The two Rangers, both junior enlisted, closed in immediately from opposite sides of the hub, braking to a halt just a meter behind Watts.

  “Prep a frag grenade for maximum dispersal and get ready to chain fire on my signal.”

  “Yes, sergeant.”

  “Corporal Rooks,” Watts continued, “after we prep the hatchway, give it a three-count then secure the entry and wait for the rest of us to advance.”

  “Gotcha, Sarge,” the Alpha fire team leader replied in a casual drawl, as if he did this every day.

  “Don’t call me ‘Sarge,’ Rooks.” Watts warned him, an edge of annoyance to her voice.

  “Sure thing, Sarge.”

  “Listen to me, Corporal…”

  “Now, if you please, Sergeant Watts,” Lee interrupted the chatter. “Before the Jeuta die of boredom.”

  “Yes, sir.” Watts sucked in a breath so close to her last words that it came through the mic despite automated filters intended to block out that sort of noise. “On three. Two, one.”

  The rocket propelled grenade erupted from her launcher on a trail of smoke, so close to her maneuvering jets firing that Lee couldn’t tell which had come first, and before he could blink, Goulden and Whiting had passed by as well. The kettle-drum detonation of the grenades could have been a single blast, each rolling off the echoes of the last.

  Smoke poured out into the hub, circling into a tornado of haze being sucked upward into the air filtration vents and Lee strained his ears trying to hear screams or cries of pain. There was nothing. Jeuta were durable bastards, but he didn’t think even one of the genetically-engineered workers could take a grenade blast without making a sound.

  “Go!”

  Corporal Rooks described an arc upward, curling into the hatchway with the rest of the squad close behind. Lee followed the last of them, expecting to hear gunfire on the heels of their entrance. Again, nothing.